There are many situations in which an entity or group of entities, such as a global financial institution with banking, brokerage, and other aspects, wishes to combine the functional resources of different web application servers in order to aggregate functionality to the customers of the entity or group of entities. Such an entity or group of entities may wish to allow their customers access to such an aggregated functionality by signing on only once, by authenticating themselves once, and then being able to use different services which might be provided either by different servers of entities within the group of entities, or by servers of the group of entities and, for example, by servers of third party entities.
In this context, the entity or group of entities may wish to deliver to the customer, via a web browser, a set of services that are hosted by different web application servers. Such application servers may employ different platforms, such as a UNIX platform, an NT platform, or some other type of platform. The platform may have been constructed by different organizations within the group of entities, or the platform may have been provided by third-party providers. In any event, an essential problem is how to allow the customer to sign on once and then to redirect the customer to these different servers without requiring the customer to sign on each and every time he or she goes accesses a different server.
Conventional products attempting to address this problem are deficient, for example, both in terms of performance and cost. In some such products, it is necessary to return to a centralized resource. Other such products do not support crossing organizational boundaries or Internet domain boundaries. What is needed is a methods and system for single sign-on user access to multiple web servers, such as a federation of web servers sharing sub-domains, that overcome such disadvantages and that provide other advantages.